


An End to Winter

by Lasgalendil



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: All the Avengers being Avengers, Angst, Boys In Love, Darcy Lewis is a trashy fanficcer, Fluff and Angst, Get lost get found, I Will Go Down With This Ship, M/M, Not sorry Marvel Comics canon, Stucky - Freeform, Suicide Attempt, Suicide Notes, Thor is strangely okay with this, Up all night to get Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 20:48:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 4,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasgalendil/pseuds/Lasgalendil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sorry, Stevie. It’s the end of the line. Go live your life, punk. Make it a good one.</p><p>It was Sam Wilson who realized it first: The Winter Soldier might be destroying HYDRA, making amends...but the man who had once been Bucky Barnes had no real intent of living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sam Wilson

Steve Rogers was Captain America. Steve Rogers was an All American Hero. Steve Rogers was the First Avenger. Steve Rogers was a tough son of a bitch who wouldn’t appreciate that sort of language. Steve Rogers was a good soldier. Steve Rogers was a good friend. And Steve “Stars and Stripes” Rogers was loyal to a fault.  
  
…and Steve Rogers could be purposefully, pig-headedly, resolutely oblivious to the obvious when he wanted to be.  
  
And right now, Sam Wilson was pretty sure he wanted to be. The Soldier’s hints hadn’t exactly been subtle, and the Soldier’s hints hadn’t exactly been _hints_ , either.  
  
But Sam had seen this sort of masochistic self-destruction before. Depression, drug use, sexual indiscretion, violent outbursts…however it manifested, it was dangerous, and it was a warning sign to any veteran who knew it.  
  
Barnes wasn’t coming home.  
(It’d been 70 years. Barnes didn’t have a home.)  
Barnes wasn’t stopping.  
Barnes had no intention of turning himself in.  
Barnes was the Winter Soldier, now. And the Winter Soldier was writing Steve a good-bye letter  the only way he knew how.  
  
Killing HYDRA.  
  
But Barnes had gone a step further than that, the sort of step that made Sam think, oh shit. The sort of step that would give a man with any intention to live a pause.  
  
“All I’m saying is…why publish it? Think, Steve. He _has_ to know. He’s uploading every dirty secret HYDRA ever had—hell, blowing covert ops and covers they’ve been running for years. He’s dumping everything, including the things they did to him. Hell, complete with any audio-visuals. Pictures, medical reports…some of this stuff, Steve, it’s _snuff pornography with victim who can’t fucking die_ , and he’s leaving it out there for the world where anyone with internet access can see every single sick thing they’ve ever done. That they’ve made him do. He’s murdering every HYDRA agent or asset he can get his metal hand on. That sound like the sort of guy who’s planning on turning himself in?” The sort of guy who needs saving?  
  
…who even _wants_ saving?  
  
“What are you saying.” There was that pig-headedness he’d been talking about again.  
“Man, I’m trying to put this delicately.”  
“You think he wants to go down fighting. Be the hero the world thinks he was.”  
“He’s looked smaller. Sicker,” Sam tried to break the news gently. “Every time we’ve seen him.”  
“Just tell me what you’re saying.”  
“I think the Winter Soldier’s on his farewell tour. I think your friend plans to kill every single last one of these HYDRA motherfuckers…then I think he plans to die.”  
“Not if I find him first.”  
Five continents. Thirty-seven countries. Who knows how many hours of goddamned lost sleep. “Steve, the only reason we’ve found him so far is because he’s wanted to be found. He’s reached out to you—hell if I know why, if even _he_ really knows why—but he’s reached out to you every step of the line. It’s been three weeks now,” Sam stopped, well aware of the ground he was about to tread. Three weeks since last contact. Since last sighting. Three weeks of radio silence on a backdrop bathed in blood.

...now _nothing_.

  
A muscle in Steve’s stern jaw twitched. He knew. 

“I don’t think we’re looking for Bucky Barnes anymore, Cap,” Sam continued softly. “I think we’re looking for an unmarked grave.”  
  



	2. Steve Rogers

Flying out of Finland and it hits him.  
A lightning bolt of clarity.  
Suddenly it’s so absolutely obvious he can’t believe he hadn’t seen it sooner. The sort of intricate, living poetry and sadistic irony only Bucky Barnes could manage. That factory. In Austria. Where it all began. That’s where he’d be. That’s where he was leading them. That’s where he was waiting.   
  
_That’s_ where Steve would find him.  
That’s when Bucky Barnes could finally come home.  
  
“You see anything?” he calls over the comms to Sam. They’re close. So close. He can feel it.  
The open channel was a mix of static and silence.  
“Sam?”  
“Yeah, Cap. I see something. But you’re not going to like it.”

 

Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes, 107th Infantry   
1917-1945

  
  
Then, in bold Cyrillic script:

  
THE WINTER SOLDIER  
1945-2014

  
“Unmarked, huh?” and he’s laughing, turning to Sam. “You never knew him. No one ever knew Buck like I did. Never knew what a dramatic pain in the ass Bucky Barnes could be.”  
“If you say so, Cap,” Sam’s voice is light. Too light. “Sure he could say the same about you.”  
“All the time,” he says, nods, knows this isn’t the end, it can’t be, Buck would never do this to him. It’s a trick, a joke, another smokescreen, make the world stop hunting for the Winter Soldier, let this whole mess with HYDRA, Sokovia, with Wakanda blow over. But he’d be back. Bucky Barnes would be back. One day he’d be walking the streets of Brooklyn, roaming the shores of Coney Island and that idiot would just be standing there, grinning, tell him he took long enough.  
  
 _Took you long enough, Stevie. Took long enough to find me._  
  
Bucky Barnes wasn’t dead. He was still alive. Watching. Waiting. One day he’d be ready to come home.   
  
“Cap?”  
“You’ll see,” he hears himself saying. “Buck wouldn’t do this. It’s just another ruse. Another clue—“  
  
But at the bottom of the door, wedged through the narrow window between steel and stone, bent and crumpled where it’d been shoved forcefully through the plates, so small next to the stark epitaph it must’ve been an afterthought: a letter.  
  
  
Sam pulls it gently from its resting place.   
He feels his heart drop.  
“It’s for you.”

  
  
STEVE ROGERS

  
And that handwriting is so heartbreakingly familiar.   
  
_Sorry, Stevie. It’s the end of the line. Go live your life, punk. Make it a good one._  
 _PS: Sharon Carter? Please. Even Skinny Steve could do better than that. Don’t make me call Peggy to kick your ass. She’s 93, she might break a hip, and besides we both know your scrawny butt couldn’t take it._  
  
 _Do yourself a favor, Stevie. Don’t open this door._  
 _God. I wish_  
  
But the words ended abruptly, thick ink stretched out into nothing, a sentence incomplete, a life interrupted, a love ruined.   
  
_You know. Don’t make me say it._  
  
“That what I think it is?” He hears Sam say. He isn’t listening.   
  



	3. Maria Hill

“Cap—Steve,” she protests. “You can’t do this.”  
“I’m Captain America,” he bristles. “The hell I can’t.”  
“Steve, listen to me—”  
“Goddamnit, Hill! My friend is dying!” Over his shoulder, Wilson’s white eyes go wide.  
“Steve…Steve please. he’s a wanted man. By the World Peace Council. By SHIELD. By every major government organization in the world. You bring Barnes on the Quinjet, and he’s good as dead.” Or worse. Prison wasn’t the only place for a cybernetic assassin. The Winter Soldier’s resume was long and intimidating. There wasn’t a world power that wouldn’t vie for the chance to claim him. On a planet of seven billion people, only Steve “Naive Idealist” Rogers was too stupid, too stubborn to see it.   
“Hill, please—“ And it wasn’t Captain America anymore, not the Soldier, not the Shield, not America’s Greatest Hero…it was just Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers kneeling on the tarmac clutching the broken body of a broken boy. And Steve Rogers was sobbing. “Please. He’s _dying_.”  
“Can’t do this, Cap,” she sets her jaw. “I can’t let you. As far as I’m concerned I lost radio contact, you and Sam were never here, and James Buchanan Barnes died in 1945.”

  
[1945 or 2014. The outcome was the same.] 

  
He might hate her. Think she was only protecting her country, her career…but the truth was Barnes needed all the protection he could get. SHIELD couldn’t give it. The US government wouldn’t give it. Cap could.

  
“Call Stark,” she told Wilson. “Call Stark now.”  
  



	4. Pepper Potts

“You _what_ —?!” Pepper woke to hear Tony sigh. “Yeah, yeah, okay. Talk to my secretary.”

  
She groaned, rolled over in their satin sheets, shot Tony a glare that was half-angry, half-inviting. She wasn’t above talking a call in bed, and Tony “I am Iron Man” Stark was certainly immature enough and horny enough to go down on a woman casually taking calls from major world leaders and militaries.

  
[To be honest, it was her favorite game.]  
[Even better if there was armor on.]

  
“I’m the CEO of Stark Enterprises," she pouted, "not your—“ but the strained look on his face stopped her.   
“It’s Potts,” she took the proffered phone warily. “I’m listening.”  
A private plane and pilot out of Austria. Crossing six time-zones, at least seven sovereign airspaces, with a misplaced cargo and passenger manifest. Nonstop to Stark Tower.

  
Sam never said what. Or why.  
…but she could make a solid guess as to _who_.  
  



	5. Tony Stark

Tony Stark sat down in the shower and cried.

  
If not wanting to help shield your parents’ murderer and an international terrorist from justice and _just leaving the metal-handed motherfucker to die alone in agony_ made him a shitty person…well, it wasn’t something the world didn’t already know.   
  



	6. Meanwhile in New Mexico...

“The Soldier of Winter!” the voice of the Thunder God shook Jane’s small apartment, vibrating the windows (and something very pleasant else. Jane would kill her.) as the poor Stark phone flung from his hand wildly, landing in a clatter of parts and a shatter of glass in the corner.   
“Who?” Jane and Eric asked, oblivious. Those two never kept up with any current news that wasn’t in covered in _Scientific American_. Nerds.  
“The Soldier of Winter! Our lost companion! Our fallen brother in arms in need of redemption!” He clapped his wide arms around them all. “He has returned!”  
“Loki? Thor, we _saw_ the body—“ Jane began worriedly, promptly interrupted by a bellow of “ANOTHER!”  and yet another mug was sacrificed to the whim of Odin’s Son.  
  
Make that two. Eric had throw his as well. Possibly in good measure, possibly because he could, and most certainly because he’d made the mistake of trying to keep up with Thor. Again. It’d been hours since he’d lost his pants. It wasn’t the first time. Wouldn’t be the last.  
  
“Come, Jane! My love! We must celebrate!” And in his massive, muscly arms, Jane Foster made a reedy sound through her nose that sounded less like celebration and more like a lung popping. Her face had gone a blotchy purple.  
  
 Darcy’d always wanted to be choked out. It sounded hot. Like, actually _hot_ -hot not 50 Shades of I-Could-Read-Way-Better-Fanfic-For-Free sort of hot.   
  
[Jane still hadn’t forgiven her after finding her A03 account. But hey, Darcy could write Thor/Jane and Thor/OFC and Thor/Jane/OFC like the shit. Research, she insisted to her devoted readers and reviewers, was _critical._  
  
[“I swear to God, Darcy!“ Jane had threatened over the incriminating hard drive, “you publish ONE MORE THING ABOUT MY SEX LIFE AND I’LL—"  
“Which God would that be, I wonder? Yon God of Thunder?” That had shut her the hell up for awhile.  But Thor had been less than unamused. Thor was _ecstatic_. “Jane, my love! Look! What wondrous ideas your friend has! Your Midgard customs are strange! Let us make haste to try them!” That had shut her the hell up for a good long while. Like, permanently. Darcy was positive that Thor and Jane getting their rocks of to Darcy _writing_ about Thor and Jane getting their rocks off so Darcy _could get her own rocks off_ (Ian wasn’t much use in that department. Great kisser, fantastic cuddler, cute hair, but couldn’t find a clitoris on a map of the female genitalia if it was labelled for him, bless.) was probably the deepest, weirdest, most erotic level of meta the internet had ever invented.  
  
…And this from a girl who shipped Johnlock.]  
  
“Holy mother of fuck,” she sighed, turning to Boothby, who was currently nodding off against the counter. “Why can’t _you_ have arms like that?”  
  



	7. Bruce Banner

Bruce Banner was perhaps the world’s leading expert on remaining calm in times of deep emotional crisis.  
It was a good thing, too. Steve Rogers was a _mess._  
“But you can fix him,” he insisted stubbornly, for the hundredth time that night. “You can.”  
“I’ve drained the pulmonary effusion as much as I could without collapsing the lung…but Cap, he’s _septic_. Bad. He’s immunocompromised by the starvation—“

Smart, a clinical part of him said. Any immediate danger to the Soldier’s bodily integrity would trigger his protocols for self-preservation, but Barnes had found a work around. A painful, agonizingly slow work around. Barnes had wanted to be dead, just as Bruce longed to be.

…and Barnes had made it _work._

He felt guilty letting him die. He felt even guiltier taking that victory away.

“But the neural interface on that arm is massive, Steve. It’s draining every last molecule of glucose from his blood, the ATP from his cells, it’s burning through him and I can’t feed him any faster without risking what little access we have.”

 _So take off the arm_ , Steve didn’t say. Steve had read the files as much as he had, understood little, but it was obvious even to a layman that the arm—whatever they’d done to Barnes to interface his spine, his brain, his _soul_ with that arm—was permanent.

He’d done some preliminary genetic testing already. Similar mutations to PEPCK-C, like Steve had, the accelerated metabolism, increased speed of healing, seeming impermeability to fatigue and pain…and enough telomerase to make the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks seem short in comparison.

The Winter Soldier would never age. Never grow old. Never die.

…But provided the right circumstances, he could be _killed_. And Barnes had done his damnedest. Bruce recognized—respected, even—that level of determination. Neither he nor Barnes had ever signed up for this…but even his own exposure had been an accident, not deliberate human experimentation.

Not torture.

Torture. That was the word. It felt more like torture than actual medicine. The body—the brain—what was left of Bucky Barnes wanted to die. And Bruce wasn’t letting him.

“Tell me,” Steve grunted instead. “Tell me.”

“He’s so dehydrated my only option was to go through his tibia (Bruce thought getting the rotor-saw through the super-soldier’s bone would be a challenge. The jelly he’d found instead had been nauseating.) and I’ve been running fluids subcutaneously and through an NG—his veins are so flat I can’t get a line, not even a central one. His liver and kidneys have failed to the point where I don’t even dare draw _blood_.” It was a strange sort of anemia and polycythemia, where his concentrated blood cell count was both simultaneously too high and too low. Where the slurry of near-solid blood in his veins was too thick, too viscous to bring meaningful nourishment to his suffocating, starving organs or pallid skin…yet too thin to clot. As they spoke, straw-colored serum continued to ooze from the leg, the nose, the bloodshot eyes, every sore on that grey, shrunken skin.

“It’s bad, Steve. He’s depleted every fat storage in his body, he’s breaking down muscle and bone. The rhabdomyolysis alone has already stopped his heart. Twice.”

Bruce blanched. Balked at the words. “He’s…he’s _really sick_ , Cap. I need you to be okay with me saying he might not make it.”

 “I’m not okay with that,” Steve shook his head—as if this were an argument, and he could win through sheer stubbornness alone (and, Bruce reminded himself, this was Captain America, The First Avenger, The Greatest Hero of The Greatest Generation, the man who’d single-handedly taken down HYDRA, survived 70 years in unmonitored cryostasis and walked away with a mild _headache_. If anyone in the history of humanity could win an argument with God, the cosmos, several billion years of human evolution, it would be him.)

  
[And if any man who ever lived deserved a miracle...well. Jesus was fiction and Gandhi was _dead._ ]

“I will never be okay with that.”

“I’ll do what I can, Cap. But I can’t make any promises…and you shouldn’t either.”  
“You’re going to be fine, Buck,” Steve Rogers choked. “You’re going to be just fine.”


	8. Clint Barton

Clint sat up all night in the Eyrie, watching.

[Sam hated that name, said it should be the Falcon’s nest. Or something stupid like that. Clint hadn’t really been listening. Sam was always going on and on about stuff like that, saying he was the one with the true ‘bird’s eye view’, blahblahblah, ’I’m so cool look I have wings anyone could use if only they too had the manual I’m so superspecial and cool Cap lookkit, lookatmeeee’, etc. A simple ‘God, Wilson, get a room. You’re worse than Coulson,’ would usually shut him up for a while. But Clint was the _original_ Hawkguy around here, thank you very much, as he constantly reminded anyone who would listen (or be in his general vicinity) so the Eyrie it remained.]

Clint sat up all night in the Eyrie, watching. He had a dozen major news networks on the television, streaming silent in the background. He had Google, Bing, even fucking Yahoo set to alert him on an uptick in mentions of SHIELD, Captain America, The Winter Soldier and/or boolean combinations of the three. (See what he did there?) He had satellites watching all the well known Russian military bases and all the lesser-known Russian military bases and all the unknown Russian military bases and all the super-secret unknown Russian military bases, and it was all adorable, really, that they thought they could hide from him.

But so far, all was quiet. Nothing on NBC. CNN. BBC. Al Jazeera. Or—God really fucking forbid—Fox.

…Oh. Would you look at that. Beyonce dropped another album. Hot damn. Just for that, he was treating himself to a new pair of hearing aids and a new set of speakers, and he was treating Laura to a romantic night for two complete with nookie, dinner, nookie, more nookie, and some concert tickets (possibly followed by even more nookie). Laura just fuckin’ _loved_ Beyonce.

[Clint loved Beyonce’s ass.]  
[Laura said that was fine, as long as she got Daniel Craig. Clint thought about it for a minute, then called it fair.]  
[Although if Laura wanted Beyonce, Clint was happy to share. He loved him some Laura-on-Queen Bey faux-lesbian action. Laura called him such a teenager. Clint thought a man could dream.]

 

The headphone speakers were tinny, and the base/treble sucked, and he’d have to get Stark to invent something more catered to his configuration, but Queen Bey was Queen Bey, and at his age an impromptu overnighter required both copious amounts of caffeine and goddess goodness in order to function.

Every once in a while he’d glance down. James Barnes dying. Bruce exercising his bedside manner muscles. Steve Rogers crying his eyes out, bawling like a little kid. Nope. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all.

He played Angry Birds. Man, he loved that game.

You get it?

  
En route

  
Can you pick up a pizza?

  
SRSLY??!!

  
Yeah. JARVIS hates unscheduled deliveries.

She would kill him. Man, he was killing himself.

 

[Laura said he told dad jokes. Clint said he was a dad so he didn’t see the problem.]  
[Laura grounded him from the PS3 for a week.]

 

“Romanov?” Banner asked in that Oh-Christ-I've-forgotten-what-a-boner-felt-like way of his.

  
“Here,” Nat said. “I called in some favors. Old contacts. Got in touch with a handler from the Red Room. It’s what they used to feed him back in the Soviet days. I couldn’t find anything more recent.”

 

Brucie and Natty sitting in a tree…

  
You’re seriously going to do this now

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  
Seriously Barton

First comes love  
Then comes marriage  
Then comes

He thought better of it. Deleted that last line.

  
You bring Brucie fun science stuff and you can’t even get me a pizza?

The hell is that stuff anyways?

…Seriously, Romanov

Hawkman is hungry

You bring my pizza?

Nat shot a glare up at him that could fell a Chitauri at fifty feet.

 

Is that a no?

FUCK YOU BARTON

She would kill him for sure.

He pulled out his earbuds, rappelled down. He couldn’t hear well from this distance, and truth be told his long distance lip-reading skills sucked.

SHOW OFF

“You having a heart attack, Banner?”  
“Tasha, this stuff is nearly 100 calories per _millileter_.”  
“No shit.”  
“It’s a hundred times the concentration I’ve been giving him, and I borrowed that from the veterinary pharmacist at the Bronx Zoo. It’s meant for orphaned rhinocerous.”

 

[Clint believed the correct term to be rhinoceri, possibly rhinocerouses (he had a three-year-old. He’d heard it both ways). But now just wasn’t the time.]

 

“No way his body can handle this,” Bruce shook his head. “Not right now.”  
“If it doesn’t, we might not get another chance,” Nat insisted. “You said it yourself, Banner, he’s a supersoldier, the Soviet’s killing machine. His body’s made to heal itself _but he’s starving to death._ So we unstarve him.”  
“If we’re taking a vote on dangerous, experimental medical treatment potentially killing Winter Boy, I’m in favor.” Stark called, then shrugged. “No offense, Cap.”  
“Go to hell, Stark,” Nat and Steve said together.  
“Twinsies,” Stark sipped his coffee, unperturbed. Then— “And you’re welcome, Cap. I expect a fruit basket in my bedroom by morning. And when I say fruit basket, I mean strippers.”

Clint watched from the Eyrie. On the monitors, nothing happened. He got through the Beyonce album at least twenty times. He got a new high score on Angry Birds. James Barnes was dying. Bruce was flexing his bedside manner muscles, Steve Rogers was crying like a baby, Nat was sleeping against his shoulder, Laura sent a scandalous sext of her thong elastic around the toes of her left foot, and all was right with the world.

Well, almost.  
…still could’ve used a pizza


	9. Not Bucky Barnes, Not Anymore

Stevie was there when he opened his eyes. Of fucking course he was. Bucky Barnes was such a fucking failure, the Winter Soldier was so fucking damned they couldn’t even _die righ_ t. He opened his eyes and Stevie was there, a prickly bunch of unwashed, uncombed blonde hair laid on his bedside, smelling of stink, sweat, and halitosis.

  
“Hey, Stevie,” he tried to say. But it was more just a wordless whine. Couldn’t make his lips, his lungs work right.

  
“Bucky?” Steve sat up instantly, blinked the bleariness from his blue eyes. “Bucky—?”

  
“You dumb punk,” he wheezed. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”

  
“Not on you,” those hands found his, clutched them greedily. “Not ever.”

  
“Don’t, Stevie—“

  
“I’m, I’m sorry, I—“ and that hurt look was plain enough. _I know what they did to you_. (Hell, the whole world knew. It was kind of the fucking point). “I’ll—I’ll try not to touch you, Buck.”

  
And it was just so adorably, stupidly, mistakenly Stevie he had to laugh. Then choke. Then it took him five minutes just to be able to fucking breathe again.

  
“You okay?” Stevie asked, reaching out then remembering half-way what he’d just promised.

  
“You think _that’s_ why?” he continued, the ridiculousness and nostalgia turning to bitter ice. “Don’t you know anything? That thing’s still here, Stevie! It’s still here. In this arm. And it wants to kill you.”

  
“I know you,” Steve insisted, scooting closer like the ass he was. “I _know you_ , Buck. And you won’t hurt me.”

  
“I’m not who you think I am, Stevie. I went to the—“ the word escaped him. Words often did. “Place. With all the pictures. Commandos and stuff. And they were right: Barnes died a long time ago. I’m not him. They ripped Barnes out and stuffed hate inside, sewed this arm on to keep it all in and that’s what’s left. All there is. All there’ll ever be.”

  
“I don’t believe that. I _won’t_ believe that. Not for a minute. Not if it takes you the rest of our lives.”

  
He tried not to smile. Tried not to cry. But something was broken inside him where his heart used to be. He got them confused sometimes. Sometimes he couldn’t feel anything at all. “You always were such a beautiful idiot…and such an insufferably self-righteous piece of shit. And God, I loved you for it—at least _he_ did—but you should’ve let me die.”

  
But Stevie was Stevie, after all this time, all these years, as beautiful and earnest as ever. “I’m not going to let that happen, Buck.”

  
“But if you don’t, Stevie, it’s going to kill you. _I’m_ going to kill you,” he shut his eyes. Tried not to cry, not to think of those moments on the bridge, the helicarrier, the wet, crunching sound of Steve’s throat in his fist, the way his lips split over his teeth and gums when his jaw had broken over and over and over again…and he was whimpering, retching, small, not the Winter Solder, not Bucky Barnes, not some boy from Brooklyn just some sniveling, wretched, broken _thing_ that knew the only goodness, only kindness, only real love in the whole wide world across a thousand centuries had a name and his name was Steve Rogers and still he’d almost killed him.  “Please, Stevie. Please let me die. Please don’t make me kill you.”

  
_“I know you_.” Stevie insisted. “James Buchanan Barnes, _I know you_.”

  
[ _You know me,_ he said. _You know me_.]  
[It was English. How strange. Because even the Asset knew.]  
[It means I love you.]

  
“I know you.” Then Stevie leaned forward, kissed his hand—his metal hand—his hair, his forehead, kissed the tears from his lashes, the lines from his face, the salt from his sniveling nose, kissed the very cries from his lips…


	10. Romanov in the Air

“So…” she said, sauntering over the to sick bed and plopping down beside Rogers, her face 100% shit-eating grin. “You and _Barnes_ , then. Didn’t see that one coming.”

  
“Fuck you,” he frowned as she cackled, ribs sore and face splitting.

  
“Cheating bastard,” Barnes grunted from the bed.

  
Natasha fell to the floor, positively howling.


End file.
